The friendship between the 20th century's two political titans

12:01AM BST 18 Apr 2007

John Campbell reviews Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness by Richard Toye

Suddenly everyone is writing about relationships. Single biographies are out - all the obvious subjects have been done to death - and the joint biography offers the best way of repackaging familiar figures: Coleridge and Wordsworth, Gladstone and Disraeli... We have already had Churchill from every possible angle, so now Richard Toye gives us his relationship with Lloyd George. In fact even this has been done before - last year by Lloyd George's great-grandson - but Toye's is a far more exhaustive and scholarly treatment.

Lloyd George and Churchill are the twin giants of 20th-century British history. Since war is still the ultimate test of leadership, the two architects of victory in 1918 and 1945 regularly leave admirable peacetime premiers - Asquith, Attlee, Thatcher - trailing in the league tables of prime ministers. Historians used to debate which was the more inspiring leader, which the greater man. Until recently many would have put their money on Lloyd George. But as the Great War fades into memory as a futile tragedy, while the defeat of Hitler remains - as Churchill indelibly called it - Britain's 'Finest Hour', so Lloyd George's reputation has become increasingly tarnished while Churchill's goes from strength to strength.

Both were far more than just war leaders; but their lives were defined by the two wars. Lloyd George was hijacked by 1914-18 out of his proper course. As Chancellor before 1914 he had proved himself the most constructive radical politician of the century - with Churchill his no less radical disciple. He loathed war and entered into it with deep reluctance. ('I am moving through a nightmare world,' he wrote to his wife). But once convinced of its necessity he threw himself into waging it with an energy and brilliance which made him Prime Minister in 1916 - but only at the cost of splitting the Liberal Party and leaving him dependent on the Tories, who eventually dumped him.

Churchill, by contrast, loved war. ('I am interested, geared up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?') He thought 1914 would be his opportunity. In fact his bullish conduct of the Admiralty - and particularly the disastrous Dardanelles campaign - almost wrecked his career. It was Lloyd George, at some risk to himself, who brought him back to office in 1917 and kept him there until 1922. But Churchill remained widely distrusted for the next 18 years, until another war fortuitously cast him as the Man of Destiny after all.

Related Articles

For nearly 40 years Lloyd George was the only man to whom Churchill consistently deferred. Sometimes he chafed at his subordination, often he raged at Lloyd George behind his back; but he always acknowledged the older man's superiority. Some time in the late 1920s, when Churchill was Chancellor, he asked Lloyd George - now long out of office - to call on him at the Treasury in connection with The World Crisis, his famously egotistical history of the war. 'It could not have gone better,' he told his PPS wrily. 'Within five minutes the old relationship between us was completely re-established. The relationship between Master and Servant. And I was the Servant.'

Between the wars their paths diverged. Churchill rejoined the Tories, and derided Lloyd George's imaginative schemes to tackle unemployment. The 1930s found them both in the wilderness, equally contemptuous of Baldwin and Chamberlain; but while they kept in touch they could never find a common platform on which to come together. Yet in May 1940 Churchill still made huge efforts to persuade his old friend - now 77 - to join the war cabinet. Finally Churchill had gained the upper hand; but Lloyd George did not like it. He was envious, and made all sorts of flimsy excuses to refuse. It was a sad end to their long association.

Richard Toye's thesis is that the two were never so close as sentimental accounts of their friendship - promoted not least by the two old warriors themselves - have claimed. 'Whether in or out of office,' Churchill recalled in 1955, 'our intimate and agreeable companionship was never darkened... by any serious spell of even political hostility.'

Of course this was very far from true. Toye has deployed an astonishingly wide range of sources - many previously unpublished, others dug from the most obscure diaries and letters - to chart the tensions, criticisms and mutual bitching that inevitably characterised such a long relationship between two such powerful personalities at the very summit of politics.

Among other things he has made telling use of early drafts of Churchill's writings, which he often toned down before publication. His book is a mine of fascinating material which will be unfamiliar even to readers who think they know their Lloyd George and Churchill pretty well. The non-specialist, on the other hand, may feel a certain degree of overload.

Toye ducks the question of which was the greater. Ultimately, however, the accepted picture still stands. Of course they had their differences. But the fact remains that the relationship of these two titans was indeed, as Lloyd George claimed in 1938, 'the longest friendship in British politics'. In fact it is hard to think of another that comes close.